“Brillo?” he said. “Sure. He’s a sea dog. Born in a boat, grew up in a boat, fully boat-broken. Hunkers over the gunwale to do his business and never wee-wees to windward.” He leaned over and scratched the dog’s ears.
Brillo was as curly haired as his master, and nearly as big. He had hard, yellow wolf’s eyes that gave the lie to his happy, doggy grin.
“He earns his keep,” the man said. “He’s a guard dog, the best I ever saw. I picked him up as a puppy over in Colón from a guy who said he was descended from a long line of guard dogs—from the famous Bercerillo of Ponce de León, who could sniff out bad Indians from a crowd of good ones. Balboa had one of Bercerillo’s pups, and that’s how the line got established in Panama. This guy’s official name is Bercerillo, too, but I call him Brillo for short.”
“What make is he?”
“Beats the hell out of me. Must have some wolfhound in him, judging from his size, and probably some Chesapeake, from the coat. He’s terrific in the water. Here, toss me that beer bottle.”
Miranda tossed up the empty, and the man threw it far out into the anchorage. The dog watched it splash but didn’t move. He quivered, though, waiting.
“Fetch it, Brillo boy.”
Gone like a shot, the dog launched himself from the end of the dock in a flat, hard racing dive that must have carried him nearly thirty feet, then swam to the spot where the bottle had sunk. With no hesitation Brillo surface-dived, his tail wagging briefly. He was down for a full minute, then emerged with the bottle firmly in his jaws. He paddled back to the beach and shook himself dry, dropping his catch at the man’s feet.
“Okay,” Miranda said. “I’m sold. Now if he can hand, reef, and steer, tell good sea stories, and polish brightwork during the off watches, I’ll hire him.”
The man laughed, and she laughed, too.
“Come on aboard and have a beer.”
His name, he said, was Hugh Curten—Curt for short.
They worked the Baja and the Sea of Cortés for most of that year, carrying whale watchers to Magdalena Bay and Scammons Lagoon to see the gray whales rolling and mating and calving, their big barnacle-crusted hulks as long as, or longer than, the ketch itself. They had an inflatable—a twelve-foot Avon Redshanks—in which to run alongside the whales and surf on their bow waves, veering off only when the wide flukes rose to smash at them. The whales retaliated by spouting to windward and drenching them with spray that reeked of rotten fish, but the passengers loved it. They wanted to pet the whales and got huffy when Miranda wouldn’t let them. She soothed their feelings with ice-cold cerveza and fiery tequila.
In other seasons they cruised the Sea of Cortés from La Paz north to Mulegé, stopping to skin-dive among the sea lions on rocky reefs eerily sculpted by the waves or to spend the night on an empty beach, the passengers sleeping in tents after an evening of song and chitchat around a roaring driftwood bonfire, Miranda and Curt sharing the wide bunk in the master’s cabin aboard the ketch. Curt proved a charmer with the customers, far more tolerant of their lubberly ways than Miranda, and the money was good.
From what little he revealed of his shadowy past, she came to realize that he’d run contraband in the Caribbean—marijuana, cocaine, automatic weapons and ammunition now and then—making small fortunes from time to time and just as quickly blowing them on cards or poor investments. For a while he’d owned a bar called the Cockleshell in Christiansted, down in the U.S. Virgins, but that had gone up in smoke, literally, when he crossed a Bolivian cocaine supplier on a run to Bimini. “The DEA was watching me,” he told her. “I could just feel it. So I deep-sixed the load in a thousand fathoms off Turks and Caicos. I tried to explain the bit about discretion and valor, but the Bolivian didn’t buy it. I’m lucky he didn’t waste more than the Cockleshell.”
“Did you have insurance on the place?” Miranda asked. They were sitting on the sea-lion rocks of Isla de Santa Cruz, north of La Paz, on a leisurely cruise to Loreto, while the passengers snorkeled in the shallows. Frigate birds swung overhead on crooked black wings.
“Yeah,” Curt said. “All in a phony name. I had to beat it fast. Never collected a penny, and I guess I never will.”
“Sounds like a loser’s game, the smuggling trade.”
“Tell me about it. I used to tell myself I was doing it out of contempt for society, that the money didn’t really matter except as a way to keep score. Curt, fifty thousand; yuppies, zip. All I needed was to hit a cool million, and I’d be out of the game. Well, if I ever show my face down in the Caribbean again, I’ll be out of the game all right, for keeps. Even this side of Mexico is scary.”
“I know some nice islands out thataway,” Miranda said, pointing west. “In the Cooks or the Tongas, or up around Kosrae in Micronesia. No fortunes to be made out there, but a good life anyway. And nobody to recognize you.”
“You figuring on heading out that way again?”
“Maybe. It depends.”
She could see in his eyes the fear that had driven him across the isthmus and up the coast to Baja. She could see, she thought, that he’d learned his lesson. She could sense that deep down he was a fairly decent man. She was wrong.
A month later they were back at Cape San Lucas, doing day sails around Los Friales, the twin rock-spires near the tip of the Cape, awaiting the start of the whale-watching season. Curt seemed more nervous than ever—too many wealthy gringos who might recognize him, she thought. If he were spotted and word got back to the bad hats—either his Bolivian nemesis or the DEA—both of them might be killed. But she could not betray a shipmate, couldn’t leave a buddy in the lurch. She liked Curt. Well, maybe she even loved him. It hurt her to see him so frightened.
Had Miranda known the truth about Curt, she would have been even more hurt. Far from being a dope runner, he was an undercover agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, one of their best. Over the past eight years he had infiltrated half a dozen South American and Caribbean drug networks, posing as a hard man with a heavy hand on a fast boat’s throttle. But the longevity of deep cover is like that of the mayfly—ephemeral in the extreme. He was lucky to have survived this long, and when it became evident in Saint Croix that the ruthless barons of the cocaine empire were getting wise to him, his superiors had sent him to Baja, out of harm’s way. He was merely marking time, awaiting orders to a new scene of action.
The orders came care of a small, potbellied, bright-eyed man named Miller Grilse, ostensibly the American manager of a Baja resort hotel but actually a DEA station boss. Grilse arrived at the dock where they were moored in San José del Cabo while Miranda was in town cashing some traveler’s checks and buying supplies. He gazed deadpan at Curt for a few long moments, then winked broadly, and stabbed his thumb shoreward. They walked up the esplanade toward a cantina.
“Out in the southern Philippines,” Grilse said softly, “there seems to be a major relay station for Golden Triangle heroin. Run by a renegade gringo named Millikan. Maybe not a renegade, though. Maybe a U.S. Navy type. Why, we don’t know. Very little communication these days between agencies. You know how it is.”
They stopped at the cantina and bought a couple of bottles of Tecate, then walked on. Grilse drank left-handed. His right biceps had been slashed by a Japanese samurai sword during World War II, out in the Philippines where he’d organized guerrilla bands for the OSS. He’d been a tough little guy then. He was even tougher now.
“Millikan’s got his own private navy there,” Grilse continued. “Local pirates, what they call mundo. Moslems, most of them. They bring the shit out of Thailand by fast boats, then funnel it east through contacts in the Philippine Navy. We want you to make your way out there, casual-like, as if you were on the run still from the Caribbean. Cover your tracks as well as you can. Steal a boat or something. Then ease on up to the Millikan operation and wangle a ride with them. You’ve got a good reputation as a fast-boat driver. Hell, you know what to do, you’ve done it often enough the past few years.”
“Sail,” Grilse said. “Something you can handle by yourself. Why not steal that ketch you’re in right now?”
“No,” Curt said. “That gal’s okay. I wouldn’t want to do a number on her.”
“You sweet on her?”
“I guess so.”
“All the better. More convincing that way if Millikan checks you out.”
“I don’t know,” Curt said.
“Well, get yourself a boat one way or another. Your old pal Phil Chalmers is in Manila now, with Military Air Transport. Crooked as ever. We could have taken him out any time we wanted since the two of you did that job in Panama, but we’ve let him dangle out there and kept a close eye on him. He seems to be cozying up to Millikan. If you need help making contact with Millikan’s outfit, Chalmers might be able to help you.”
“What do I do once I’ve joined up with Millikan?”
“Get the details of the operation. Find out if they really are ONI. Or whatever. Then ease on out and get the word back to me. We’ll take it from there.” He finished his beer, belched like a foghorn, then flipped the empty over the seawall into the milky surf. He winked again, glum-faced but happy. He loved his work.
“Wish I was going with you,” Grilse said. “That’s my old stomping grounds out there. Great place, the PI. The men are bastards, wicked as sin, but the women are the best-looking babes in all Asia. Suerte, sailorman. And look out for the Benny boys.” He winked again, cryptically, turned on his heels, and waddled up an alley toward his pickup truck.
When Miranda got back from town, Curt was gone. Brillo was gone. Seamark was gone, too.
At first she couldn’t believe it. Maybe while she was in town, she told herself, some tourists had come by demanding a sailing trip—now or never. People from the States like to demonstrate their power by making spur-of-the-moment decisions like that, changing plans or directions at the snap of a credit card. But she knew she was kidding herself. They were gone. One evening, sitting on a bollard at the end of the dock, she started cursing—every salty phrase she’d learned in half a dozen languages. A potbellied little gringo stopped to watch her. He had a crippled arm, she saw, poor fellow. He winked at her clownishly, gave her a crooked thumbs up, and walked on.
Later that week she signed on as mate of a forty-one-foot Morgan beating its way back north after a race. In Ensenada she asked for her pay and with it bought the catboat. It was a seagoing Hyundai compared with the solid workmanship of her ketch, but it was seaworthy—twenty-four feet long, beamy, with a deep center-board and a new mast. In it she sailed north to the land of her birth. Up there maybe her wounds would heal. Years ago, when her parents were still together, they had all gone to visit her dad’s folks at their house near Port Albion. She’d loved the house—big, warm, and shiplike, with lots of pictures and books on the walls. There were old harpoons, and guns and swords and old steering sweeps leaning every which way, and model ships swinging from the rafters, sea-shells that hooted ghosts in her ears. She remembered a big brass kettle the size of their Volkswagen, it seemed, that her grandfather said he’d used in the olden days to boil down blubber for whale oil. His own father had found it on a cannibal island out in the South Seas. “Why, Miranda,” he’d told her one day, “you could cook a whole missionary in this pot—two if they was little fellers.”
Every day, back then, they had gone sailing up and down that cold, bright, piny-smelling coast. Her dad let her take the helm of the old family schooner, and for the first time she felt the strength of the wind thrumming down through canvas, and watched the water boil closer and closer along the gunwales as they heeled to its might. “Spooming,” her granddad called it in old sailor talk. Right then, she realized, with the wheel kicking under her hands, she was seeing the entire course of her life unreeling ahead of her.
Now she’d strayed off course through no fault of her own. Maybe her father could steer her back. Maybe.
SEVEN
“Viv?”
At first she didn’t recognize him. The man who came down the broken stone steps to the dock looked old enough to be her grandfather—white hair, slouched shoulders, the whiskers on his mottled face grown out in uneven patches, as if he’d tried to shave a week ago, then given it up halfway through, then picked up again on the other side a few days later, then quit for good. But it couldn’t be her granddad. He’d died long ago. This man must be her father.
“No,” she said, forcing a smile. “Miranda. How you doing, Dad?”
His eyes were murky green, the whites gone a curdled yellow, gummed at the corners of the lids as if his head leaked phlegm. Dim, slow eyes. Then they lighted up for a moment. But it was a weak spark, what you might expect from a corroded plug in a junkyard engine.
“Miranda?”
“Yes.”
Now he tried to smile. Cracked lips, yellow teeth. The skin around his eyes creased into a million tiny white ridges that crawled across his cheekbones like albino wireworms. An old cut on his eyebrow popped open and beaded with blood. Even the blood looked pale, but maybe it was the light.
One pocket on his dark-blue wool CPO shirt was ripped and dangling. The other bulged with a dingy handkerchief crusted with dried blood. His khakis were worn through at the knees, stained and rumpled. Even his shoes were falling apart—old navy dress shoes, cracked from want of polish, and so worn at the heels that when he turned to lead the way back up to the house, she could see the brads gleaming through the rubber.
The house was a mess, too. Dust lay thick on the shelves and tables, clothes were scattered and crumpled like disaster victims on the bare, dull floors, plates, bowls, cups, and cutlery left wherever they’d last been used, unwashed, caked with mummified food and the dusty corpses of flies. The house smelled of garbage and stale coffee. Impossible. He’d always been a stickler for neatness. “Shipshape and Bristol-fashion”—if she’d heard him say it once in her childhood, she’d heard it a thousand times. Home from the sea, he would spring surprise “white-glove inspections” on her mother, finding minuscule smears of grease or infinitesimal deposits of dust in the hardest-to-reach places, then issuing demerits in a voice that was only half-kidding. His khakis were always pressed to a razor crease, his shoes spit-shined to a mirror gloss.
He’d shaved every morning without fail, even on leave. They had a routine when she was a little girl: once he had lathered up—he used a brush and a shaving mug, she remembered—she would demand a kiss. He’d stoop down and grab her to him as if to smear her with the hot, white lather, then stop her just millimeters from collision and brush the tip of her nose with his cheek. It left a feathery blob there, which he would then—very cautiously, as if the act entailed great peril—remove with his straight razor. “Don’t move now, Miranda, or I might slip and shave off your whole nose.” But of course he was using the blunt back side of the straight razor. She knew that, but she didn’t know it—or chose to pretend not to know it. The thrill was delicious. At her demand, when the whole hazardous operation was complete, he would apply a dab of Old Spice to the tip of her nose. It tingled, ice-cold and burning, and for hours afterward she could breathe its exotic, dangerous reek.
Now, as he moved to grab a pile of dirty clothes from the armchair by the front window, she heard his foot kick something that clunked like hollow glass. It rolled away under the chair and tinked against a chair leg. A bottle.
“Have a seat,” he said at last. “I haven’t been much of a housekeeper. Can I get you something? Uh, coffee? I think I’ve got some wine around here somewhere. You want a glass of wine, maybe? Homecoming and all that?”
“No,” she said, trying to smile. “Nothing right now. I want to get my land legs back. I haven’t been ashore since below Dana Point.” She hope that might draw him out, get him asking about where she’d been, where she’d come from. But his eyes remained vague, unwilling to look straight at her.
“Well,” he mumbled, “I could use something.” He walked toward
the kitchen. She heard him clanking around, muttering to himself. She stooped down and reached under the armchair. It was a wine bottle. Gallo Thunderbird. Empty.
Now he was cursing in the kitchen, his voice at first low and monotonous, then rising toward the timbres of hysteria. She went in. His eyes, when he turned to her, were red and full of tears. “Fuck it!” he screamed, then turned and smashed a cupboard door with his fist. He was shaking all over, his hands especially. “I can’t find it, I know I had it somewhere in here. Where is it? I wanted to give you a drink for your homecoming. Where is it? I can’t see it . . .” He stood looking at her with his broken hands clenched in lumpy white fists, tears dripping raggedly through the white stubble of his whiskers. His panic reached her like an airborne virus.
“Wait right here,” she said, shaking. “I think I saw it.”
She ran back to the living room, to her seabag, unzipped it, and pulled out the liter of José Cuervo she’d bought in Tijuana on her way north, before clearing Customs and Irritation. It was untapped. She’d meant it, after all, as a house gift.
“Here it is!” He was standing in the kitchen doorway, not looking at her. But still shaking. “Here, Dad, let me pour us one.” Avoiding looking at him, she poured a couple of heavy slugs into two glasses on the coffee table. The glasses were filthy, but the tequila would kill any germs.
He grabbed his glass—“Here’s how”—and belted it back, gagged, shuddered, coughed once, dropped the glass with a clatter back on the table, then launched into a coughing spasm that turned his face red, almost purple, saliva sputtering from the corners of his mouth, eyes watering, sweat starting all over his face. He bolted, hacking, for the kitchen sink. She heard him gag again and again, dry retchings with something gluey rattling at the bottom of them. Then he hawked it up, wet and heavy, and she heard it splat in the sink.
When he came back, the shaking had stopped, and his eyes were back in focus. He smiled crookedly and raised an eyebrow at her. “Cuts the fog, sure enough,” he said, and poured himself another dollop. “Let’s go topside.”
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